Xbox One X (Scorpio) SoC Discussion

[Mopetar]

The number of third party console exclusives is relatively small, so it would have to be an amazing game(s). I've already got great HTPCs, but we'll see what it can do when it comes out.

There are a few, but I think they tend to fall into the Sony and even more so Nintendo camps than they do Microsoft. I haven't bothered to grab a console since getting a PS3 (well after it launched) and I don't think I've bought a game for it since GTA:V when it first came out. It gets most of its use as Blu-ray/DVD player these days. I might get a Switch sometime soon when they come back into stock around here as I'm a bit of a sucker for Nintendo consoles and Zelda games and a portable is more to my liking.

 

[Sweepr]

Less than 4 hours till the reveal, time for final predictions.

 

[NTMBK]

Less than 4 hours till the reveal, time for final predictions.

-some cores
-lots of graphics
-probably some memory too, I hear that's useful
-shiny (or possibly matte) black (or possibly white) case
-controller

 

[f2bnp]

Exciting stuff, can't wait to see what they're cramming into it.

 

[Carfax83]

If they use Ryzen for the CPU, then we will finally get to see AVX2 used in games.

 

[NTMBK]

If they use Ryzen for the CPU, then we will finally get to see AVX2 used in games.

I'd expect FMA3 to be more useful in most cases.

 

[imported_bman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE2hNrq1Zxs

meh, no Zen

Jaguar @ 2.3 GHz with some customization
40CU @ 1172 MHz 6.0TF Polaris derived
12GB GDD5 326GB/s
1TB HDD
4K Blue Ray Drive
360mm2 Die

Interesting bits:

However, potentially the most exciting aspect surrounding the CPU revamp doesn't actually relate to the processor blocks at all, but rather to the GPU command processor - the piece of hardware that receives instructions from the CPU, piping them through to the graphics core.

"We essentially moved Direct3D 12," says Goossen. "We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor - and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient."

Processing draw calls - effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw - is one of the most important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resources, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of CPU instructions. With Scorpio's hardware offload, any draw call can be executed with just 11 instructions, and just nine for a state change.

 

[raghu78]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

40 Customised compute units at 1172 mhz . So is this Vega NCU based GPU ?

 

[nathanddrews]

Dolby Atmos.
Jaguar
12GB GDDR5/8GB usable+ESRAM
40CUs @ 1172MHz :|
60 targeted hardware bottlenecks based upon Xbone games have been eliminated
Forza 6 4K native, increased details, full track, 60fps, 66% GPU utilization
Vapor chamber cooler

Sounds like they hit their targets. Cost?

 

[StinkyPinky]

I think it's impressive. Yeah the CPU leaves a bit to be desired but the GPU is a massive upgrade as is the memory speed/capacity.

 

[Gideon]

Interesting bits:
However, potentially the most exciting aspect surrounding the CPU revamp doesn't actually relate to the processor blocks at all, but rather to the GPU command processor - the piece of hardware that receives instructions from the CPU, piping them through to the graphics core.

"We essentially moved Direct3D 12," says Goossen. "We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor - and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient."

Processing draw calls - effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw - is one of the most important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resources, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of CPU instructions. With Scorpio's hardware offload, any draw call can be executed with just 11 instructions, and just nine for a state change.

This command processor looks interesting, I wonder if AMD has implemented something like that in VEGA. If Microsoft would support native draw-call execution in Windows as well, that could be a really nice boost

 

[raghu78]

I think both Microsoft and Sony stuck with Jaguar core as they want 100% compatiblity of all existing Xbox One and PS4 games on their new consoles. The next gen consoles are going to be a massive jump in CPU performance. Most likely a Zen 2 or Zen 3 based CPU and Navi based GPU at GF / TSMC 7nm. These true next gen consoles will not be CPU bottlenecked as AMD can easily get a 8C/16T Zen 2 or Zen 3 running at 3 Ghz at 30w using 7nm as we are already seeing R7 1700 at 3 Ghz base at 65w. I think the next gen consoles will sport 64-80 compute units. I think they will be GDDR5X based for cost and yield reasons. btw Scorpio manufactured at TSMC 16FF+.

 

[EXCellR8]

interesting... I like the design but unless I grab a 4K screen I'll just stick with what I got.

i haven't been following the development of scorpio as I though it was an entirely new platform that MS was planning. it's more of a "hey Sony, we are leading in performance again" kind of console

 

[antihelten]

Dolby Atmos.
Jaguar
12GB GDDR5/8GB usable+ESRAM
40CUs @ 1172MHz :|
60 targeted hardware bottlenecks based upon Xbone games have been eliminated
Forza 6 4K native, increased details, full track, 60fps, 66% GPU utilization
Vapor chamber cooler

Sounds like they hit their targets. Cost?

No ESRAM, just GDDR5

 

[imported_bman]

No Southbridge, unless there is stuff on the backside of the motherboard. Also not seeing any eMMC, was hoping MS would do something interesting with a bigger eMMC cache.

Another interesting bit from one of the Digital Foundry guys on Neogaf:

I figured you would enjoy the inclusion of FreeSync + HDMI 2.1 Variable Refresh and forced 16x AF across all games.

 

[mohit9206]

LMAO 34% voted for
Zen CPU Cores + Vega Based (GFX9) GPU
Does no one here have a realistic mindset about things?
If it had Zen+Vega it would cost $699 atleast.Would you pay that much for having the latest and greatest?Ofcourse no one would.

 

[Sweepr]

I'm actually happy with the specifications. This is probably the best Microsoft + AMD could come up with this year while maintaining reasonable die size (360mm²), power consumption and costs. I bet it's going to be priced at $399 for the entry SKU. Interesting bits:

- General

"We have this developer tool called PIX [Performance Investigator for Xbox]. It lets us do some GPU trace capture. He and his team did a really deep analysis across a breadth of titles with the goal that any 900p or better title would be able to easily run at frame-rate at 4K on Scorpio. That was our big stake in the ground, and so with that we began our work speccing out what the Scorpio Engine is. It's not a process of calling up AMD and saying I'll take this part, this part and this part. A lot of really specific custom work went into this."

- CPU

All signs point to the upclocked Jaguar cores we find in Xbox One, and Scorpio's CPU set-up is indeed an evolution of that tech, but subject to extensive customisation and the offloading of key tasks to dedicated hardware.

"So, eight cores, organised as two clusters with a total of 4MB of L2 cache. These are unique customised CPUs for Scorpio running at 2.3GHz. Alluding back to the goals, we wanted to maintain 100 per cent backwards compatibility with Xbox One and Xbox One S while also pushing the performance envelope," says Nick Baker.

The new x86 cores in Scorpio are 31 per cent faster than Xbox One's, with extensive customisation to reduce latency in order to keep the processor occupied more fully, while CPU/GPU coherency also gets a performance uplift. There's significant hardware offloading too - some of which is inherited from Xbox One, some of which is radically new.

- Reducing CPU overhead

"We essentially moved Direct3D 12," says Goossen. "We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor - and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient."

Processing draw calls - effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw - is one of the most important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resources, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of CPU instructions. With Scorpio's hardware offload, any draw call can be executed with just 11 instructions, and just nine for a state change.

"It's a massive win for us and for the developers who've adopted D3D12 on Xbox, they've told us they've been able to cut their CPU rendering overhead by half, which is pretty amazing because now the driver portion of that is such a tiny fraction," adds Goossen.

- GPU

custom GPU that has been designed from the ground up for optimal performance on today's game engines - and that runs at an unprecedentedly high clock speed for a console.

"We also leveraged the fact that we understand the AMD architecture really, really well now and how well it does on our games," continues Goossen, "so we were able to go through and examine a lot of the internal queues and buffers and caches and FIFOs that make up this very deep pipeline that, if you can find the right areas that are causing bottlenecks, for very small area [on the processor] we could increase those sizes and get effective wins."

The end result is 40 Radeon compute units in the custom Scorpio Engine, ramped up to a remarkable 1172MHz - a huge increase over Xbox One's 853MHz, and indeed PS4 Pro's 911MHz.

"As you can see, we doubled the amount of shader engines. That has the effect of improvement of boosting our triangle and vertex rate by 2.7x when you include the clock boost as well. We doubled the number of render back-ends, which has the effect of increasing our fill-rate by 2.7x. We quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, again for targeting the 4K performance."

- Memory/Storage

Scorpio runs its GDDR5 modules across a 384-bit GDDR5 interface ("So you were right!" laughs Goossen) that uses 12 32-bit channels. The modules themselves run at 6.8GHz, offering a final bandwidth figure of 326GB/s - on top of which, Microsoft gets the benefit of AMD's delta colour compression (DCC) system, an element that wasn't present on Xbox One. And yes, Scorpio does indeed feature 12GB of memory, as indicated on Microsoft's E3 motherboard render, 8GB of which is available to developers, with 4GB reserved for the system. That's an additional 1GB of reservation compared to Xbox One, required in order to run the dashboard at native 4K. Titles still receive an impressive 60 per cent bump to overall memory though, and to ensure loading times consistent with full HD Xbox One games, Scorpio ships with a 1TB hard drive with a 50 per cent increase in bandwidth.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

 

[Sweepr]

The GPU portion features 44 CUs (customized changes by M$/AMD), with only 40 of them active to improve yields. That's 2816 GCN cores, coincidentally the same as Hawaii.

The Scorpio Engine processor measures 360mm2 and features seven billion transistors. We got to see the chip plan, with the four shader engines occupying the majority of the die, skewed towards the left of the layout. Each SE actually has 11 compute units, with one disabled per block to increase chip yield on the production line. To the right of the GPU sit the two clusters of custom CPU cores, while the memory interfaces skirt the edges of the chip.

Microsoft suggests 6 TFLOPs here will be able to provide better performance than an equivalent 6 TFLOPs PC, we'll see. Either way, running Forza 7 at 4K 60 FPS on the equivalent to PC's ultra settings is really impressive.

The bottom line is that Scorpio's six teraflops will almost certainly go a lot further than an equivalent PC part. I asked Microsoft about this specifically, and they raise a number of good arguments that make the case strongly. Firstly, that their shader compiler is far more efficient than PC equivalents (think of shaders as native GPU code). Secondly, addressing the hardware directly via their API and with access to console-specific GPU extensions again adds to the advantage of a fixed platform box. And finally, they point to their optimisation software - PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) - as a tool that provides the path to console-specific optimisations that PC simply cannot get.

From what I've seen so far, there is some evidence that Scorpio's true 4K performance could pose a challenge to the likes of Nvidia's GTX 1070 and AMD's Fury X-class hardware. I've seen Microsoft's new console running a Forza Motorsport 6-level experience locked to 4K60 on the equivalent to PC's ultra settings - cranking up the quality presets to obscene levels was one of the first things developer Turn 10 did when confronted with the sheer amount of headroom it had left after a straight Xbox One port. Out of interest, we tested Forza 6 Apex with similar settings at 4K on GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080. Frames were dropped on GTX 1060 (and a lot of them when wet weather conditions kicked in), while GTX 1070 held firm with only the most intense wet weather conditions causing performance dips. Only GTX 1080 held completely solid in all test cases. It's only one data point, and the extent to which the code is comparable at all is debatable, but it certainly doesn't harm Scorpio's credentials: Forza 6 Apex received plenty of praise for the quality of its PC port.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...pio-is-console-hardware-pushed-to-a-new-level

 

[SPBHM]

it's interesting to see the high clock of the GPU
I think the XB1 and PS4 had around 800MHz GPUs while the desktop cards based on the same process were running at around 1.1GHz

 

[Carfax83]

I'd expect FMA3 to be more useful in most cases.

Isn't FMA3 FP only? I thought games used INT more than FP.

 

[lolfail9001]

Interesting bits:

Not really interesting, bite me twice if that's not a marketing spin on already present interaction between D3D12 and GCN.

Forza 6 4K native, increased details, full track, 60fps, 66% GPU utilization

Not too bad but then again, if we do not know details, it's not telling us much either.

 

[CatMerc]

The GPU portion features 44 CUs (customized changes by M$/AMD), with only 40 of them active to improve yields. That's 2816 GCN cores, coincidentally the same as Hawaii.

Polaris based Hawaii.
Words cannot describe how much I want that. Not even logically, just something akin to a child for my R9 390.

Not really interesting, bite me twice if that's not a marketing spin on already present interaction between D3D12 and GCN.

It reduced the CPU drawcall instruction count from thousands to 11. Battlefield 1 DX12 CPU load dropped in half thanks to it. I don't see how that's something that already exists in GCN.

Not too bad but then again, if we do not know details, it's not telling us much either.

A port done in 2 days with no optimization work running at the exact same settings as Xbox One. They proceeded to crank the settings up since they had so much headroom, but the console maintined 60FPS.

 

[dogen1]

Polaris based Hawaii.
Words cannot describe how much I want that. Not even logically, just something akin to a child for my R9 390.

Isn't it at least partially based on vega? With command processor upgrades that vega may not even have.

 

[raghu78]

Wow. Polaris based Hawaii (with 4 CU disabled for improving yields). The key to Scorpio being a really good console could be the native implementation of few high frequency DX12 calls in the GPU command processor. This helps offload the CPU cores and really helps a lot in avoiding CPU bottlenecks in achieving the best possible performance out of that powerful 6 TF GPU. Scorpio could be the first console to provide 60 fps locked performance across all titles.

 

[asendra]

Wow. Polaris based Hawaii (with 4 CU disabled for improving yields). The key to Scorpio being a really good console could be the native implementation of few high frequency DX12 calls in the GPU command processor. This helps offload the CPU cores and really helps a lot in avoiding CPU bottlenecks in achieving the best possible performance out of that powerful 6 TF GPU. Scorpio could be the first console to provide 60 fps locked performance across all titles.

I'm not denying those changes will help the performance, but, you know, all consoles are capable of 60fps locked games. It´s just that the developers always continue pushing the hardware more until they don´t. Same will happen with Scorpio unless Microsoft really requires 60fps locked as a validation requirement.